for young people · by young people · about young people

The UNEP Magazine for Youth

Melt down

Get COOL in 2007!

Polar plight

Mari Boine – singing nature

Warming ice

Tara – riding high

Ice explorers

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TUNZAthe UNEP Magazine

for Youth. To view current

and past issues of this

publication online, please

visit www.unep.org

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)PO Box 30552, Nairobi, KenyaTel (254 20) 7621 234Fax (254 20) 7623 927 Telex 22068 UNEP KEE-mail uneppub@unep.orgwww.unep.org

ISSN 1727-8902

Director of Publication Eric Falt

Editor Geoffrey Lean

Special Contributor Wondwosen Asnake

Guest Editors Karen Eng and Claire Hastings

Nairobi Coordinator Naomi Poulton

Head, UNEP’s Children and Youth UnitTheodore Oben

Circulation Manager Manyahleshal Kebede

Design Daniel López Zamora, Ecuador

Cover Edward Cooper, Ecuador

Production Banson

Youth Contributors Michael Agnone, United

States of America; Helga Anfinsen, Håkon Bore

Haaland, Hanna Monslaup Eikås and Kristian

Øien, Norway; Preetam Alex, India; Nina Best,

Brazil; Maksym Byelikov, Czech Republic; Neasa

Coll, Canada; Rowan Hodge, Canada; Mihaela

Hristova, Bulgaria; Ben Mains, United States of

America; Julien Paquin, France

Other Contributors Mari Boine; Gabriele

Brennhaugen and Charlotte Fjelltvedt; Fred

Pearce; David de Rothschild; Rosey Simonds and

David Woollcombe, Peace Child International

Printed in the United Kingdom

The contents of this magazine do not necessarily

reflect the views or policies of UNEP or the editors, nor

are they an official record. The designations employed

and the presentation do not imply the expression of

any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNEP con-

cerning the legal status of any country, territory or city

or its authority, or concerning the delimitation of its

frontiers or boundaries.

Editorial 3

Heat trap 4

International Polar Year 5

Pole-pole 5

Core of the issue 6

Sniffing the future 6

TUNZA answers your questions 8

Riding high 9

Warming ice – and frozen feet 10

Ice rivers 11

Melt down 12

Changing minds 14

Trying to stay cool 14

Polar plight 15

Singing called me back 16

Countdown 2008 16

Cold prospect 18

Melting lives 18

Get cool 18

Ice explorers 20

Not just going with the floe 20

Seven iced wonders 22

CONTENTS

2 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

UNEP and Bayer, the German-basedinternational enterprise involved inhealth care, crop science andmaterials science, are workingtogether to strengthen young people’s environmental awarenessand engage children and youth inenvironmental issues worldwide.

A partnership agreement lays down a

basis for UNEP and Bayer, who have

collaborated on projects in the Asia

and Pacific region for nearly 10 years,

to step up current projects, transfer

successful initiatives to other

countries and develop new youth

programmes. Projects include:

TUNZA Magazine, the International

Children’s Painting Competition on

the Environment, the Bayer Young

Environmental Envoy in Partnership

with UNEP, the UNEP Tunza

International Youth/Children’s

Conference, youth environmental

networks in Asia Pacific, Africa and

Latin America, the Asia-Pacific Eco-

Minds forum and a photo competition,

‘Ecology in Focus’, in Eastern Europe.

Melt down 3

Not long ago, the polar ice caps and the world’smountain tops were thought to be pristine, amongthe few parts of the planet to have remained

unsullied by humanity and pollution. Now we know theyare feeling the heat more than anywhere else on the globe.For global warming is having its most dramatic and ominouseffects at high altitude and high latitude, with enormousconsequences for the rest of the planet. Like the canariesthat miners used to take underground, they are providing anearly warning of grave dangers to come.

Temperatures are rising faster in these cold corners of theEarth than over the planet as a whole, and the effects arealready all too visible. The very atlases are having to beredrawn as great ice shelves collapse on the AntarcticPeninsula, forever changing the shape of its coastline. Arcticsea ice is shrinking much more than ever in recorded history,and may disappear altogether by the middle of the century.Glaciers are retreating at both poles, suggesting that both theGreenland and West Antarctic ice sheets may eventuallymelt, causing sea levels to rise to cover most coastal cities.And they are also rapidly thawing in mountains across theworld, from New Zealand to Alaska, the Himalayas to theAndes, the Alps to Africa’s Mountains of the Moon: theirdisappearance would devastate water supplies worldwide.

So melting ice is a hot topic, one of the hottest there couldbe. It is also one of the most urgent challenges we face. Itdemands immediate changes in government polices, inindustrial practices – and in all our lifestyles. We mustrapidly reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide and othergreenhouse gases by reducing our use of polluting fossilfuels and by preserving forests and other key ecosystems.Otherwise we will be the first generation since the start ofhumanity to witness the vanishing of the Earth’s ice andsnows. And, like the canaries in the mines, their extinctionwill presage deadly peril for us all.

EDITORIAL

Cool & CoolerIDEA 1: Empower people to become active agents of

sustainable and equitable development.

Cool: Plant a community organic garden at school or in

the neighbourhood.

Cooler: Start a group that meets regularly to prepare a

special meal with the garden’s harvest.

Coolest: Read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal,

Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, and be inspired

to eat only home-grown and local produce.

IDEA 2: Promote an understanding that communities

are pivotal to changing attitudes towards environ-

mental issues.

Cool: Go for a long walk or bike ride in a local nature

area with family and friends.

Cooler: Organize a carbon-free parade, with people

using their favourite mode of green transport, eg:

walking, jogging, skateboarding, roller-skating, cycling

and unicycling, even pushing baby buggies!

IDEA 3: Advocate partnership, which will ensure all

nations and people enjoy a safer and more prosperous

future.

Cool: Ask your teachers to help set up green pen-pals

with a school in a different country, and share ideas on

helping the environment.

Cooler: Find an environmental programme in another

country that you’d like to support. Organize a local

photo exhibition, talent show, concert or play to raise

money to help support this cause and spread the word

about it.

World Environment Day

CONGRATULATIONS to Charlie Sullivan (11) of the United

Kingdom, global winner of the 16th annual International

Children’s Painting Competition on the Environment

(www.unep.org/tunza/paintcomp/), themed on climate

change. The joint second prize went to Catherine Nishchuk

of the Russian Federation (see image on page 15) and

Petkova Polina Zdravkova of Bulgaria.

4 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

It may sound like the least likely salessuccess story in history, but the Inuitare rushing to buy air conditioning as

the world warms up. And no wonder. Ayear ago a heatwave sent temperaturessoaring into the low 30s Celsius in partsof the Canadian Arctic, following awinter which saw people basking inFebruary temperatures of 9ºC on theArctic Circle rather than the normal -30ºC. Their buildings, designed to beairtight against the cold, are turninginto heat traps.

And yet this is perhaps one of the leastdramatic of all the changes facing thepeople of the far north. They are losingtheir hunting culture as their prey – likepolar bears, walruses and seals – fleethe warmer temperatures, and as theice gets too thin for them to travel safelyover it. Houses and other buildings arecrumbling as the frozen earth beneaththem melts: plans are underway torelocate whole villages.

The Inuit are at the sharp end of one of the most ominous changes ever to afflict the planet – the increasing

disappearance of its ice. Arctic sea ice has been rapidly retreating, glaciers are thawing all over the world, andscientists are even beginning to fearthat the great Greenland and WestAntarctic ice caps are beginning to meltirreversibly – a process that couldeventually raise sea levels by 12 metres,inundating vast areas of land andsubmerging most of the world’s greatcoastal cities.

Sea ice in the Inuit’s Arctic is nowmelting 40 times faster than just twodecades ago, and the process seems to be accelerating. Last September itreached its second lowest extent ever – only behind 2005 – and scientistsbelieve it would have set a new recordhad it not been for an abnormally coolAugust. And as white ice is replaced by dark ocean, less of the sun’s radia-tion is reflected, and more of its heat is absorbed, causing the region towarm and thaw still more. Someexperts predict that the ice will dis-appear altogether in summer in littlemore than 40 years; others fear that the massive addition of freshwater to

the North Atlantic may disrupt the Gulf Stream, which makes northwestEurope hospitable to human habitationin winter.

Greenland’s glaciers are greatlyaccelerating their once-slow progresstowards the sea as temperatures rise,partly because the melting ice allowspools of water to form on their surface,which then flows down through cre-vasses to the rock beneath. Once thereit forms a liquid layer between the rockand the bottom of the glacier, allowingit to move as if on a conveyor belt.

Much the same is happening at theother end of the Earth, in Antarctica,where the movement of glaciers isbeing speeded up by similar layers of water: a study of 244 of them found87 per cent to be retreating. And vastice shelves have disintegrated, literallychanging the face of the maps in adevelopment unprecedented in at least10,000 years.

Glaciers are melting almost everywherein the rest of the world, as the map on

HEAT

Melt down 5

In March 2007, 5,000 scientists from 60 countries celebrated the opening ofInternational Polar Year, a massive two-year research collaboration focused

on the effects of global warming in the Arctic and Antarctica – such as meltingglaciers and sea ice – and how the poles interact with the rest of the planet.The 220 individual research projects include a census of the marine biodiversityin the Antarctic recently exposed by the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf,which involved scientists from 18 countries; exploration of subglacial lakes;and astronomical studies.

Many of the Year’s projects are part of ongoing research, but it provides a valuable opportunity for individual institutions and nations to pool theirresources – both financial and scientific – to explore these remote, treacherousregions. Scientists hope the information gleaned during this internationaleffort will give us a more complete picture of how climate change affects thewhole world, as well as increase our knowledge of the poles – conceding thatit will still only be the tip of the iceberg.

TRAP

pages 12-13 shows. As they disappear,vital water supplies will be put in dangerfor perhaps a billion people, from theChinese and Indian plains, to SouthAmerica’s dry Pacific coast, to the NorthAmerican West. And as they melt, gla-cial lakes form high in the mountains,threatening to cause ‘tsunamis from thesky’ if they burst their banks. When thishappened to a lake in the Andes in1970, some 60,000 people are thoughtto have lost their lives in what was,perhaps, the first great disaster causedby global warming.

Even more worrying, vast amounts ofcarbon dioxide (the main cause ofglobal warming) and methane (an evenmore potent greenhouse gas) could be released by the melting of thepermafrost that binds the cold landareas of the world. This would causethe world to heat even faster, greatlyaccelerating climate change, andthreatening to create a vicious cyclethat could spin global warming out ofcontrol. And that would face all of us,not just the Inuit, with massive threatsto our ways of life.

INTERNATIONAL

POLAR YEAR

Pole-pole

In February, US student Michael Agnone joined a UN-sponsored climb of

Mount Kilimanjaro in aid of at-risk youth in Africa. Here he describes his

experience on Tanzania’s ‘Rooftop of Africa’, just 300 kilometres south of

the equator.

‘Pole-pole’, slowly-slowly in Swahili, was our chant as we climbed. Thebeauty of the mountain was astounding, as were the sights: the plants, thehorizons, the icy blue glacier. The snowy top was the most beautiful thing Ihave ever seen. But this beauty is fading; the glaciers of Mt Kilimanjaro areslowly melting. I had heard about the effects of global warming around theworld, but up there I witnessed it first-hand. It is destroying the mountain’sbeautiful glaciers – they have shrunk by more than 80 per cent since 1912,the first year they were measured, literally disappearing. According tonumerous studies, all ice on the mountain top will be gone in the next 15years. But I’ve been there and seen that icy blue from Gilman’s Point. I willalways remember it as it gives way to the effects of global warming… and notso ‘pole-pole’.

Fred Bruemmer/Still Pictures

Kim Holmén (pictured below right) stands on

top of the world. He spends much of his

time at Ny-Ålesund, a science research

station on the island of Spitsbergen, deep in the

Arctic Circle and surrounded for much of the year

by frozen ocean. And from there he travels in

the world’s most northerly cable car to the top of

a mountain.

Mount Zeppelin is named after Ferdinand von

Zeppelin, well known as an airship designer, less so

as an Arctic explorer. One of his airships flew from

Ny-Ålesund to the North Pole in 1931. Today, his

name is again at the cutting edge of science in the

Arctic; the mountain has some of the world’s most

sophisticated equipment, sniffing pollutants out of

the Arctic air.

Kim and his team call it their watchtower. ‘This is the

place where humanity will get the first hints of

the world’s future – of global pollution, or runaway

climate change, or a sudden alteration of the ozone

layer,’ he says. ‘For here, in the thin, cold Arctic air,

is where much of the world’s pollution ends up.’

Spitsbergen is an international island, run by

Norway, but under a treaty that allows anyone to

come here. Ny-Ålesund, the world’s most northerly

town, is full of scientists from a dozen countries. Kim

comes regularly because he is in charge of many of

them. And because he loves it.

It’s a weird place. It may be close to the North Pole,

but Kim remembers when, in July 2005, a party

of politicians and journalists, togged out in their

heaviest overcoats and fur hats, ‘stepped off the

plane to find scientists in t-shirts and shorts.

Temperatures had hit 19ºC.’ Even though the town –

which is reached by the Gulf Stream – is warmer

than most places in the Arctic, he adds, this was yet

another sign that global warming has taken a grip on

the frozen north.

Ny-Ålesund stands on a fjord once filled by a huge

glacier. Now it has retreated by 5 kilometres. As we

watch, huge chunks of blue ice fall off the front of it

and float slowly towards the Atlantic. Last winter the

fjord remained ice-free. Seals – which usually give

birth to their pups on the ice – failed to produce any

live offspring.

Kim’s ice expert, Jack Kohler, observes that

Spitsbergen’s glaciers are disappearing fast, raising

sea levels right around the world. ‘If you want to see

the world’s climate system change,’ he says ‘you’d

probably better come here to see it first.’

Understanding the present means understanding the past – inclimate science as in anything else.

The high levels of atmospheric pollution now being recorded byscientists mean little unless they are put into perspective. Weneed to understand how they compare with those of hundreds ofthousand of years of history, so we must travel back in time totake measurements of the atmospheric conditions of the past. Butthat’s impossible… isn’t it?

Actually, it is as simple as drilling a giant tube of ice out ofAntarctica or Greenland. The process is called coring, throughwhich scientists can study the composition of past atmospheres.

Ice is made of stacked-up, squished snowflakes; snowflakescontain air bubbles. As snow falls, layers of ice pile up. If youlooked at a cross-section of ice that had built up over a week, you would see layers of identical little air samples trapped bysnowflakes throughout the seven days. But the scientists areexamining a cross-section of ice built up over 400,000 years,with air bubbles at the bottom containing the air that wasbreathed by Neanderthals. Studying it reveals the temperature,atmospheric composition and precipitation at that time.

A recent study, revealing that current greenhouse gas con-centrations are unprecedented in the last 800,000 years, requireda sample 3.2 kilometres long, taller than a stack of 126,000 ice cubes.

SniffingCore of the issue

Left: a slice of shallow ice core through which air can circulatefreely. Right: a slice from a depth of 120 metres, in which thetrapped air bubbles are clearly visible. Below: scientists inAntarctica remove a 10,000-year-old ice core from a drill.

6 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

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the future BY FRED PEARCE

But, if you accept his invitation, take care. As the land warms

and the sea ice breaks up, polar bears are coming ashore to

hunt and getting increasingly aggressive. They break into huts

on the island and eat anything that looks like meat – bed

mattresses, inflatable boats. And you, if you get too close.

It’s a scary 10-minute journey up Mount Zeppelin in a tiny

four-person cable car that lurches in the wind. But you are

greeted by a magnificent view across the shrinking glaciers

looking like giant frozen waves. There are fresh fox prints in

the snow, though thankfully no signs of polar bears.

But for the moment, Kim only really cares about his

equipment, sensitive enough to sniff out the smoke from a

cigarette 2 kilometres away. There is a strict no-pollution

policy in Ny-Ålesund down below. Kim says he had a row with

Greenpeace when their boat showed up here a few years

ago, because the emissions from its engines upset his

instruments.

The equipment’s job is to measure the world’s pollution. The

Arctic may seem remote – but find it on a globe and you will

see that it is surrounded by great continents. The winter winds

bring car exhausts from the United States of America, coal

smoke from Europe, methane from leaking gas fields in the

Russian Federation and heavy metals from Siberian smelters.

Sometimes the pollution forms a yellow haze over the ice.

Sometimes it rains mercury. But even the tiniest, most

invisible particles register on Kim’s monitors. His team can

use computer calculations of where the wind has come

from to track back to the source of the pollution – sometimes

even to individual factories.

Overhead, this is one of the places where holes form in the

ozone layer. By a quirk of atmospheric chemistry, gases like

chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from old refrigerators destroy

ozone only in the freezing air above the polar regions. So at

Ny-Ålesund they check for that too. Some nights see a green

laser light pointing into the sky as German researchers probe

the ozone layer.

Strangely, many of the world’s most toxic pesticides also end

up here. Though mostly sprayed onto fields far to the south,

often in the tropics, they evaporate from the soil and travel on

the breezes until they reach the Arctic. In the cold air, they

condense out, like a toxic frost. The pesticides end up on the

ice, in seaweed, or absorbed by the mosses and grasses of the

tundra – to be eaten by insects or fish, and then move up the

food chain to mice and birds and seals and polar bears.

Millions of guillemots live on nearby Bear Island, Norway’s

largest bird colony, eating the fish that eat the seaweed that

soaks up the pesticides. ‘The birds contain extraordinarily

high levels of pesticides,’ says Kim. ‘And their droppings

collect in a big lake on the island, filling it with toxic chemicals

in a place where you might expect to find the cleanest water

in the world.’

Scariest of all, Kim gets an early warning of the rising levels of

the gases that are warming up our planet, as he and his team

measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Strange to

say, concentrations here are the highest in the world. During

my visit, most other stations around the globe found the air

contained about 380 parts per million of the gas. But some

days on Mount Zeppelin, the equipment measured 390 parts

per million.

Kim thinks this is due to the ‘very rapid increase in emissions

from the booming economies of Asia’. That pollution, like the

pesticides, seems to be getting fast-tracked north. Not for the

first time, Kim believes he has caught a whiff of the future at

the top of the world.

Melt down 7

8 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

Q How much time do we have to bring global warmingunder control?

A Global warming is going unchecked, more so every year,with increasing impacts around the world. We should havestarted tackling it seriously years ago. The best current estimateby leading scientists and other experts is that we have only a decade to bring it under control before catastrophic con-sequences for the world become inevitable. We still have anopportunity to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide – anddependence on energy from fossil fuels – and at least to passon to the next generation a planet that is not entirely damagedand polluted. But the longer action is delayed, the moredrastic and difficult it will have to be. The situation demandsimmediate attention. Act, act and take action.

Q What are the consequences of melting glaciers forpeople and the environment?

A About a billion people worldwide depend entirely onglaciers for their water supplies, including several hundredmillion people in China and India alone, and scores of millionsmore in the countries of the Andes in South America. Largeparts of developed countries, like the western United States of America, also rely on them. As the world warms up, themeltwater comes earlier and earlier and there are increasingshortages later in the year. In the long run, when the glaciershave gone, there will be no dry-season water at all, withcatastrophic consequences for both people and agriculture.Increasing meltwater also threatens to make glacial lakes highin the mountains burst their banks, causing devastating floodsdownstream. And then there is the contribution of glaciers tosea-level rise as well.

Q What exactly does the human family have to do to stopthe polar ice caps melting?

A We have to move rapidly to a low-carbon economy, wherewe end our reliance on burning fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal),which releases carbon dioxide, the main cause of globalwarming. It can be done. We are now blessed with unprece-dented knowledge, know-how and resources to make cars

that run cleaner and burn less fuel, to generate electricity fromwind and sun and other renewable sources, to modernizepower plants, and to build refrigerators, air conditioners andwhole buildings that use less power. But if we do not act veryquickly it will be too late.

Q Will climate change open up the Arctic and Antarcticafor some kinds of agriculture, human settlements, etc.?

A It may do. Farmers in Greenland are already beginning to grow broccoli, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage and othertemperate area crops. Unfamiliar species like salmon androbins, for which the Inuit people have no names, arebeginning to appear in their lands. And oil companies arekeeping an eye out for new reserves as ice retreats in Arcticwaters. But any ‘benefits’ from global warming will be faroffset by harm in warmer climes, and will disappear even inthe polar regions if the world goes on heating up.

Q If the glaciers and ice caps melt, by how much will sealevels rise?

If all the glaciers outside the polar regions melted, sea levelswould rise by about half a metre. According to scientists, if the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps melted, sea levelscould rise by as much as 12 metres, changing the map of theworld, submerging low-lying islands and coastal cities andvast areas of countries like Egypt and Bangladesh.

Q What are the most important things that governmentsand people, especially young people, should do?

A Governments need to sign up rapidly to effective treaties,starting with one agreeing on heavy cuts in greenhouse gasemissions from 2012 when the present arrangements underthe Kyoto Protocol run out. But they should not wait for theseagreements, and should immediately start taking action to cutemissions. People need to remind, pressurize and persuadegovernments to act – and young people can be particularlyeffective advocates as it is they who will inherit the warmerworld. All of us need to change our way of life, behaviour andattitudes and choose a different path.

Q & A

You

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Do you have any QUESTIONS on environmental issues that you would like the experts at UNEP to answer?

Please send them to uneppub@unep.org, and we will try to answer them in future issues.

Melt down 9

Alittle greenery goes a long way

in the Arctic winter, so for the

eight men of the Tara Arctic

expedition, carefully nurtured hydro-

ponic salads are a cause for celebration.

Coming from France, Russia and New

Zealand, and ranging in age from 26 to

65, they form a tiny international family

at the top of the world. ‘The working

language is French, but we have had

moments of being lost in translation,’

says expedition chief and lone anglo-

phone, Grant Redvers of New Zealand.

‘But it’s amazing what we can commu-

nicate with stumbling grammar, mime

and drawings. And when you’re out in

a wind of 60 knots and muffled up in

heavy clothing, you can’t hear voices

anyway.’

Drifting in the pack ice – just 520

kilometres from the North Pole –

these core members of the team of

the Tara Arctic expedition are studying

the effects of climate change. The expe-

dition is part of DAMOCLES (Developing

Arctic Modelling and Observing Capa-

bilities for Long-term Environmental

Studies), a cooperative European con-

tribution to the International Polar Year.

At the centre is Tara, a yacht with

a difference. She was built by French

explorer Jean-Louis Etienne, then

taken over by renowned yachtsman Sir

Peter Blake, and is now owned by

French businessman Etienne Bourgois.

Unlike Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance,

she was designed to get caught in the

icy polar seas, with special features to

keep her from being crushed to pieces.

Her hull is shaped like an elongated

olive stone, with two retractable centre

boards instead of a keel. When the

centre boards are pulled up, there is

nothing for the pack ice to take hold

of, so as pressure on the hull increases,

Tara just pops up on top of the ice.

‘So far we haven’t had any serious

problems, but it can be quite dis-

concerting when the ice shifts around

the boat,’ says Grant. ‘Although the ice

seems solid, it’s floating on dynamic,

tidal water. When the water moves or

the wind is strong, the ice sheets are

forced into each other, like geological

plate tectonics, and form pressure

ridges. It can sound like crunching –

which isn’t so bad – or like the roar

of a train, which takes a bit of getting

used to!’

For the next year and a half, Tara

will be a laboratory for 25 visiting

scientists from 10 European countries,

the United States of America and

Russia. Some will record oceanographic

data to find out about salinity levels,

temperature, pressure and depth;

others, atmospheric data to understand

wind speed, direction, temperature and

atmospheric pollutants. Others still will

assess the thickness and composition

of the ice and will study its albedo, or

reflective power. As sea ice melts, solar

radiation (heat) is no longer reflected

into the atmosphere but is absorbed by

the darker sea, warming it up.

Tara’s crew is already taking scientific

readings: drilling holes in the ice is a

great way to keep warm when it’s -40ºC

outside. The meteorological readings

are also challenging: three specialized

masts are mounted on the ice, but have

to be rescued when it splits and moves.

But it’s a high-tech life aboard Tara.

Electricity comes from a combination of

wind and diesel generators, and 40

square metres of solar panelling were

rolled out after the Arctic night abated

in March. Most scientific data is auto-

matically sent through cables on the ice

to computers aboard Tara, then emailed

to Europe for analysis. Light bulbs and

laptops are energy efficient, and satel-

lite telephone calls and emails keep the

crew in touch with family and friends.

There’s even enough hot water for a

weekly shower, but it takes a couple of

hours each morning to collect the ice

slabs that are thawed for washing and

drinking water.

Tara is using the Arctic pack ice drift

first observed by Fridtjof Nansen (see

page 20). Over two years, it will travel,

ice-bound, some 2,000 kilometres

from north of Siberia, past the North

Pole, and along the northeast side of

Greenland.

For the moment the crew are looking

forward to the Arctic spring and the

return of light and wildlife. ‘It can be

pretty desolate up here,’ Grant con-

cedes. ‘In October we saw some polar

bears, but none over the winter. A

couple of days ago an adult male

ambled by the boat and we all got very

excited. And just this morning we found

a small beetle in the flour. It’s been a

very biologically diverse week!’

Tara Arctic

Riding high

10 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

In February 2006, Canadian Claire Hastings spent fiveweeks sailing and hiking around the island of SouthGeorgia, a 100-kilometre-long mountainous island inthe Southern Ocean. She climbed up the Heaneyglacier on a sunny afternoon, and soon realized that10 kilometres of glacier is much longer than it looks.Here, she describes her experience and examineshow the glaciers of South Georgia and the rest of theworld are doing.

Warming ice – and frozen

In 1980 (above) a huge glacier filled Jacabamba Valley inPeru; by 2003 (below) the effects of global warming hadchanged the view dramatically.

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‘It’s cold and raw on top of a glacier, as is becoming all too clear to me halfway up the immense Heaney glacier on the remote Antarctic island of South Georgia. As I slip for the fourth time, reacquainting my knees with the ice, the thoughtcrosses my mind that a little global warming might not be acatastrophe. Not a lot, of course: just enough to ease the windthat is biting my cheeks and freezing my fingers into popsicles.At this point it is hard to comprehend that an increase of just1ºC could spell disaster for the ice under my feet.

But it’s true. Despite what my rapidly chilling feet keep tellingme, the world is warming up, and glaciers are the firstcasualties. At the other end of the world from here, Greenland,with its glaciers accelerating, lost 220 cubic kilometres of icein 2005 (the entire city of Los Angeles only uses 1 cubic kilo-metre of water each year). Meanwhile, the glaciers of theAndes have shrunk by a quarter in the last 30 years, whilescientists predict that the Alps will be almost ice-free by 2050.

Should I – on my Antarctic glacier – be concerned? IfHeaney melted away, would anybody be immediatelyaffected? No one lives on South Georgia, after all.’As I learned when I got home, the shrinking of the world’sglaciers will have dire consequences. Let’s start with the Alps, where winter sports are a multibillion-dollar industry.Resorts dot the mountains of Austria, France, Germany, Italyand Switzerland, but the skiing season is getting steadilyshorter. In December 2006, temperatures there were thewarmest in 1,250 years, and snow was nowhere to be seen.The Alps’ glaciers are losing at least 3 per cent of their volumeeach year. So Europe’s recent hot summers and dry winterscould spell economic ruin.

In Tanzania the vanishing ice fields of Mt Kilimanjaro, Africa’shighest peak, will seriously hit both local people and scientificknowledge. Tourism brings in most of the country’s foreignexchange, but much of it could evaporate with the snows that Ernest Hemingway described as ‘wide as all the world,and unbelievably white in the sun’. And the mountain’sglaciers are the sole source of ice core records for Africa – the oldest layers of ice record air and climate information from 11,500 years ago – containing vital data about tropicalweather patterns over the past millennia.

In the Andes, even spiritual traditions are under threat. Peopleattending the Qoyllur Rit’I religious festival in Peru, for

feetexample, chip off pieces of the Sinakara glacier believing the ice can cure illness. In 2003, the ceremony’s guardiansstopped this because of the glacier’s retreat. A thousandyears of belief are being frustrated by global warming.

‘Scrambling up Heaney is getting progressively difficult.I’m reduced to picking my way between deep fissures andcrevasses. Torrents of frigid meltwater rush through thecracks in the ice and emerge at the ice front, forming afreshwater river that flows across the plain, through a kingpenguin colony, and down to the sea. The 250-metre-wideriver is the most visible sign that the glacier – despite thechilly air – is actually melting. If the melt rate speeds up, theriver would flood the plain, displacing the penguins and anumber of breeding elephant seals. The animals would beforced to move along the coast, and elsewhere animals,plants and humans alike face huge risks.’Glaciers provide vital water supplies, especially where there is little rainfall. Meltwater from Himalayan glaciers, for example, feeds the Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Yangtze,Thanlwin, Brahmaputra and Yellow rivers, which providewater to 2 billion people. But as the melting speeds up, two disasters ensue. First the increasing water makes lakesand rivers overflow, causing floods downstream. Forty-fourglacial lakes in Nepal and Bhutan are at risk of bursting their banks, threatening to send devastating walls of waterthrough the valleys below. Many millions of people arethreatened.

The second, even greater, disaster comes as the glaciersbegin to disappear altogether. After too much water, there isthen too little. Water supplies are already under strain inmuch of Latin America as the glaciers that feed Andeanrivers melt. Yet 2 million people in the La Paz region ofBolivia, for example, rely on glacial runoff for their watersupplies, while 70 per cent of Peru’s electricity comes fromhydroelectric dams that depend on it.

The melting glaciers also contribute to increasing sea levels.So far, most of the rise has come from the thermal expansionof the oceans: the seawater expands as it gets warmer. But,if all the world’s glaciers melt they will raise the seas byabout half a metre, though the melting of the Greenland andAntarctic ice caps would add much more.

‘The wind is picking up and I’ve reached as far up the glacier as I can go by myself. In front of me the luminousice stretches up the mountain to meet the pewter sky. As Iturn around to retrace my steps, I hear a series of pops andthen a low rumble. A few seconds later a chunk of ice thesize of a small car bobs into view at the mouth of the meltriver: a microcosm of global climate change.

I shove my cold hands into mittens and retract my selfishwish for global warming. The consequences could bebeyond my imagining.’

Melt down 11

Ice rivers

A

CD B

A The upper part of the glacier – where the snow still falls

– is called the accumulation zone. In a healthy glacier,

this covers 60 to 70 per cent of its surface.

B At the end of the glacial tongue is the ablation zone. The

glacier is melting here, and snow rarely falls.

C The equilibrium line is where accumulation and ablation

zones meet. Here, the amount of snow accumulated is

equal to the amount of ice melting.

D The tip of the tongue, where the ice thins to nothing, is

called the ice front.

Ice sheets form high in mountains where more snow falls

in winter than melts in summer. Over time, the weight of

accumulated snow and repeated freezing and thawing

change the lowest layers into grainy ice. As more snow falls,

more layers are created and eventually, driven by pressure,

the frozen mass begins to move, becoming a glacier.

Pressure and gravity help the glaciers on their journey.

Pressure builds up as their upper areas continue to accu-

mulate snow, and the bottom layers of ice deform under

the weight, enabling them to be slowly pulled downhill

by gravity.

Sometimes, glacial advance occurs because the entire

glacier slides forward, lubricated by meltwater that has

accumulated underneath it, providing a conveyor belt

between it and the rock below. Sometimes this happens

because pressure on the bottom of the glacier thaws ice,

with melting continuing as a result of friction against the

rock as it moves. Recently, another process spurred by

global warming has been hastening the movement of

glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica: pools of water,

accumulating on the surface as the ice melts in higher

temperatures, rapidly find their way down to the rock below

through cracks in the ice.

When glaciers are moving it is best not to be in their way.

Acting like giant scouring pads, they erode the landscape,

creating long, trough-like U-shaped valleys with flat bot-

toms and steep slopes.

A series of ice ages over the last 100 million years covered

temperate areas in glaciers, which then retreated in the

intervening periods of relative warmth. The most recent

deep freeze kicked in about 2.5 million years ago and its

glaciers covered 32 per cent of the Earth’s land. Today’s

glaciers are remnants of that freeze, and have been melting

and shrinking for the past 14,000 years. But as global

warming is taking hold, their retreat is accelerating all over

the world.

J. Greenberg/Still Pictures

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12 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

Melt downThe Earth’s cryosphere – its frozen regions – is melting

fast. According to the 2007 report of the Intergovern-

mental Panel on Climate Change, 30 mountain glaciers

around the world lost more than half a metre of thick-

ness in 2005, resulting from a temperature rise of

0.6ºC over the 20th century. This, most scientists

agree, is largely due to our greenhouse gas emissions.

Side-effects from the melting itself may now be

accelerating the process: when permafrost thaws, for

example, it releases methane, a long-lasting green-

house gas, from the soil; and melting Arctic sea ice

also means loss of its reflective qualities, as water

absorbs more of the sun’s energy than ice and snow.

Here are some of the world’s shrinking cold spots.

Glacier National Park,

United States of America

Two thirds of the Park’s

glaciers have disappeared in

the last century; it may have

none left by 2030.

Quelccaya ice cap,

Peru

The melting of the

world’s largest

tropical ice cap

has accelerated to

60 metres a year;

it will probably

disappear by 2020.

Breidamerkurjökull glacier, Iceland

The main glacier emerging from the

Vatnajökull ice cap – Europe’s largest

– receded by 2 kilometres between

1973 and 2000. Most of Vatnajökull’s

glaciers were receding as of 2000.

Chacaltaya glacier, Bolivia

Home to the world’s highest

ski slope, Chacaltaya lost

two thirds of its mass in

the 1990s alone, and may

disappear by 2010.

Patagonian ice fields

The Southern Hemisphere’s

largest non-Antarctic ice masses

are the Earth’s fastest-retreating

glaciers, contributing more than

9 per cent of global sea-level

change from mountain glaciers.

Greenland ice sheet

The largest land ice mass in the

Northern Hemisphere is losing at

least 50 cubic kilometres of ice per

year, enough to raise global sea

levels by 0.13 millimetres annually.

Peruvian glaciers

These have lost at least 22 per

cent of their area since 1970,

and melting is accelerating –

threatening the water and

power supply for the nation’s

arid coast, where two thirds of

its population lives.

Amundsen Sea, West Antarctica

Glaciers are losing 60 per cent more

ice into the sea than is accumulated

through snowfall – this could raise

sea levels by around 0.2 millimetres

annually.

Larsen B ice shelf, Antarctic Peninsula

A vast 3,000 square kilometres of this

ice shelf disintegrated in 2002 (shown

right in blue). Since then, local glaciers

have been moving faster, releasing

more ice into the sea.

Alaskan glaciers,

United States of America

Many of these thinned three

times faster in the last decade

than in the 40 preceding years,

producing an annual sea-level

rise of about 0.14 millimetres.

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Melt down 13

Carstensz and West

Meren glaciers,

Indonesia

Carstensz shrank by

80 per cent between

1942 and 2000, while

West Meren melted

completely in the late

1990s.

New Zealand glaciers

Glaciers have been

retreating since the mid-

19th century, and have

lost half of their area

since then. Breaking

glaciers are posing a

hazard to climbers.

Mt Everest, Himalayas

Everest’s glaciers have

shrunk by 2 to 5 kilometres

in the last five decades,

flooding glacial lakes and

nearby communities.

Tien Shan Mountains,

Central Asia

Glaciers lost nearly a third

of their area in the second

half of the 20th century, up

to 2 cubic kilometres of ice

annually.

Caucasus Mountains,

Russian Federation

Glaciers here have

shrunk by half in the

last century.

Norwegian glaciers

Many of Norway’s 1,627

glaciers are expected to

melt away within the next

century, including a third

of its largest and all of its

smallest.

Tibetan Plateau

glaciers

The largest area of

ice outside the polar

regions, these

46,298 glaciers are

disappearing at the

rate of 50 per cent per

decade, threatening

water supplies across

much of Asia.

Mt Kenya glaciers, Kenya

The glaciers at this World

Heritage site have shrunk

rapidly, losing over 75 per

cent of their area in the last

century. Eight of the 18 ice

entities totally disappeared

over the same period.

Alps, Western Europe

Alpine glaciers are likely

to shrink to 5 per cent of

their 1970s volume by

the end of this century.

Ruwenzori glaciers,

East Africa

These tropical glaciers

have melted by 50 per

cent since 1987, and

could disappear within

two decades.

Arctic sea ice

Arctic sea ice has been

shrinking at a rate of

around 9 per cent per

decade over the last few

decades. All summer sea

ice could disappear this

century.

Kilimanjaro, United

Republic of Tanzania

The glaciated area

shrank by 80 per cent

in the last century

(the images show

the change in the

northern ice field

between the early

1950s and 1999).

Arctic sea ice

Permafrost extent

Glaciers and permanent land ice

Antarctic snow accumulation

Arctic boundary

September 1979 September 2005

Sources: GEO Snow and Ice 2007; IPCC; AAAS; Earth Policy

Institute; NASA; Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Map: UNEP-WCMC/National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Arctic permafrost

Permafrost has

warmed by up to 2ºC

since the 1980s.

Widespread thawing is

predicted, which will

release large amounts

of methane and carbon

into the atmosphere.

Mihaela Hristova, TUNZAYouth Advisor for Europeand Assistant Programme

Coordinator of the National Asso-ciation of UN Youth Clubs ofBulgaria, is studying psychology at

Sofia University, trying to bring psychological perspectivesto environmental issues. She has focused her studies onfinding effective motivational and educational ways ofchanging the high-consumption behaviour of youngpeople. She explains:

A major difficulty in making progress on environmentalissues is overcoming the gap between the environmentalvalues people claim to have and what they actually do. Most people feel that the environment is important but are reluctant to take concrete action to preserve it. Andalthough ‘environmentalism’ has many good characteristics –such as caring for future generations, notions of fairness, andrespect for animals and nature – some perceive it as havingbad ones as well, such as dreaminess and extremism.

So how can we square this circle? Maybe environmentalpsychologists can help, as it may require a shift in the under-lying value people place on the environment.

Research in environmental psychology suggests that climatemay influence temperament. A cold climate, for example,exposes people to the possibility of freezing, inducing in-security, and a hostile environment with scarce resources canmake people more aggressive. A very warm climate, whereseasons do not change much and resources are easilyavailable throughout the year, might promote a more relaxedapproach.

Thinking this through, a moderate climate should be the bestfor the environment, because it provides the most benevolentliving conditions, possibly inducing holistic, intuitive andwell-balanced approaches to life. But is that so? I wouldrather leave that question open.

Raw theories are not enough by themselves to deliver a significant change in high-consumption lifestyles. Asustainable planet will not be possible without developingbehaviour patterns that value conservation. Resource-costlylifestyles, predominant in some parts of the world, present achallenge. Most techniques used to promote sustainablebehaviour seem better at bringing about short-term resultsthan achieving long-term change. Perhaps the urgency of ourenvironmental problems suggests that we should pay moreattention to environmental psychology as a way of ensuringthat sustainable lifestyle patterns spread and last.

As temperatures rise, animal and plant species are havingto migrate, following their food to more favourableconditions in cooler climes. Even slight increases in

temperature can force them to move towards the poles andup mountains. Arctic and mountain species, however, havenowhere else to go, and so they are most at risk of extinctionfrom global warming.

In the Arctic, thinning ice and longer summers are shrinkingthe habitats of polar bears, seals, walruses and other animals.At the same time, species from lower latitudes – like salmonand grizzly bears – are moving north and competing withthem for resources.

Much the same is happening in mountain ecosystems, wherethe only place to go is up. Alpine plant species have beenfound to be slowly climbing the mountainsides to competewith their loftier neighbours. Gorillas in cloud forests of theVirunga mountains of Rwanda, Uganda and the DemocraticRepublic of the Congo are making for higher altitudes as theirforests shrink through deforestation, and as climate change

takes hold they will eventually run out of road at the top.Ethiopia’s gelada baboon, Central America’s quetzal andAustralia’s mountain pygmy possum are under similar threat.

Of course, climate change affects species everywhere.European butterflies are among those moving north. But it isharder for plants that can only ‘move’ by spreading theirseeds. Plants in Canada and Russia, it is thought, would haveto migrate at an impossible rate of more than 1 kilometre ayear to stay ahead of the warming.

Worse, people – and their farms, cities and paved roads –stand in the path of such migration. It would help a little ifhumanity made it easier for the hard-pressed migrants, forexample by moving the boundaries of nature reserves orestablishing wild corridors of land between protected areas.Meanwhile, keeping a close eye on Arctic and mountainspecies will give an idea of how much climate change isaffecting the world’s intricately connected ecosystems.

Trying to stay cool

14 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

Changing minds

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The Inuit call them nanuuq; in Scandinavia they

are ‘ice bears’. Fewer than 25,000 polar

bears patrol the ice and tundra of Alaska,

Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia, and they

are becoming ever more endangered.

Polar bears travel, hunt, sleep and give birth on

Arctic sea ice. In winter and spring they hunt

seals, stocking up fat reserves that sustain them

through lean, land-bound summer months. The

seals swim too fast to be caught in open

water, so the bears have to lie in wait for

them to surface for air through cracks and

holes in the ice.

But as the world warms up, Arctic sea ice is

shrinking and, worse, melting earlier in the

season – depriving polar bears of crucial

feeding time. Underweight females cannot

sustain pregnancies or produce enough

milk for their cubs. And weakened bears

may not be able to swim the increasing

distances between ice floes, succumbing to

exhaustion. In Canada’s Hudson Bay, home to the

best-studied polar bear community, the population

has declined by 22 per cent since 1987.

Polar bears have survived for millions of years,

but some scientists now believe that, with

the way things are going, they may

become extinct within the decade.

But in December 2006, the United

States of America formally listed

polar bears as a threatened species

under the Endangered Species Act.

That requires the Government to come

up with a recovery plan and prevents it

from ‘enacting, funding, or authorizing

actions which adversely modify the

animal’s critical habitats’. Could this

be the trigger for the United States

to reduce emissions of climate-

changing greenhouse gases?

Melt down 15

POLAR

PLIGHT

Painting by Catherine Nishchuk, joint second prize, International Children’s Painting Competition on the Environment.

16 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

In the title track of her album Gula Gula (Listen Listen),Sami musician Mari Boine sings, in her native tongue:

Hear the voices of the foremothers...They ask you why you let the Earth become pollutedPoisonedExhausted…They want to remind youThat the Earth is our motherIf we take her lifeWe die with her...

Boine grew up in Gamehhisnjarga, a Sami village innorthernmost Norway, and her music is rooted in the

joik, a traditional chant expressing a person, animal orlandscape’s essence.

By turns primal and throaty, ethereal and soaring,Boine’s voice bears echoes of a bitterness she experiencedgrowing up within cultures at odds with each other. Thespirituality and culture of the Sami – the indigenous peopleof Arctic Scandinavia and Russia, often nomadic hunters,farmers and reindeer herders – were inextricably tied to theland before colonization by Europeans started to becomeaggressive in the 17th century.

Boine began performing in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until1989, when British rock star Peter Gabriel starteddistributing Gula Gula on his RealWorld label, that shebecame one of the best-known ambassadors for her culture.

‘Singingcalled meback’Mari Boine

Gabriele Brennhaugen and Charlotte Fjelltvedt, of Young

Agenda 21, report on preparations for the Tunza International

Children’s Conference for the Environment 2008 and the

issues that inspire young people to get involved.

World Environment Day will start the countdown to

the next Tunza Conference, to be held in Stavanger,

Norway, in 2008. During the celebrations on 5 June,

Tunza Junior Board members Helga Anfinsen, Hanna

Monslaup Eikås and Håkon Bore Haaland, from around the

city, and Kristian Øien, from the more northerly town of

Trondheim, will have their first get-together to start planning

it. They are looking forward to welcoming young environ-

mentalists from all over the world – and hoping to inspire new

friendships and ideas. It all started when the Young Agenda 21

Foundation – a Stavanger-based environmental organization

that collaborates with UNEP – encouraged pupils from local

Eco-Schools to attend the last Tunza Conference in Malaysia

in 2006. Almost 20,000 such schools worldwide fly the Green

Flag of the Foundation for Environmental Education and work

to raise awareness among pupils by involving them in environ-

mental activities.

‘We make an effort to recycle waste and plant bushes and

herbs in the school yard,’ says Helga. ‘We have also restored

a swamp next to a nearby river and given the area back to the

salamanders and insects.’

Kristian loves skiing and hiking through the snow. ‘Some-

thing’s been wrong this year,’ he says. ‘We have never had this

little snow before. It would be sad if it stops snowing

altogether. Just think about the animals and plants that

depend on it.’

Tarjei Krogh Eknes

Countdown2008

Since Gula Gula, Boine has recorded seven albums,building on its spare joik style, incorporating jazz, rock,electronica and instrumentation from Africa and SouthAmerica. We spoke to Boine between touring Europe andscoring Kautokeino Rebellion – a feature film about an 1852Sami uprising – to ask her about life and music in the Arctic.

Q: How did the environment shape your life growing up inthe Arctic Circle? A: I grew up in free nature, with big space all around. Weweren’t nomadic, and didn’t herd reindeer, but I grew up ona farm, and we picked berries, fished salmon from the river– nearly all our livelihood came from the land. So I learnedvery early that we must treat nature well because all thingscome from her. But when I was 15, I wanted to live in thecity like everyone else. In school I was taught that where Icame from was nothing. So I wasn’t interested in nature for10 years. When I started to sing, I realized the wisdom in my traditional culture, and I learned to value nature again.Singing called me back.

Q: Much of your music deals with the struggle betweentraditional and modern ways of life. Do you think thesetensions affect how we treat the environment?A: For a long time the modern world has forgotten thateverything comes from nature, and has wanted to conquerit, taking as much as it can. Our biggest challenge now is to find a balance between modernity and treating nature withrespect, not abuse. I want my music to remind all people ofour spiritual link to nature. I can’t say music can save theworld, but anything that can keep the human flame that’sconnected to Earth alive is a way to save nature. It may be anaive belief, but I want to keep it.

Q: Tell us a bit about the joik. What is its relationship to theenvironment? A: Because my people lived so close to nature, followingseasons and animals, much of joik reflects nature. But

we don’t sing aboutnature, we sing nature.The song is a way forhumans to be part ofnature, and deep in the past it was part of shamanistic ritualscommunicating withnature gods. Many oldSami ways were lost to colonization, butsome elements, likejoik, have survived.

Q: What can the world learn from Sami culture?A: It can learn from all indigenous cultures – not only Sami– that everything is linked. It could learn to live moresimply. Sometimes modern people don’t see how what wedo to nature affects us, and our children. Many aren’t awareof the link between nature and humans – which isspirituality. And, as indigenous Canadian folk singer BuffySainte-Marie sang, ‘Third-Worlders see it first’ – peopleclosest to nature see pollution’s first effects. Ice is melting.This affects indigenous livelihoods in Greenland, in Alaska. And it affects the Sami – about 20 per cent of us –who still herd reindeer. When temperatures fluctuate,reindeer cannot get food. Normally reindeer migrate to thecoast before rivers melt. Now it’s melting earlier. It is allconfused now.

Q: What is young people’s role in the face of climatechange and global warming?A: The world’s young people are more aware and awake: I see that children are far more caring about the environmentthan adults. And when I see young people’s wild protests, Ifeel they’re really screaming, ‘We don’t want money, cars,and things, things, things!’ We are drowning in things.Spirituality is the only way for materialism not to win.

Hanna, who cycles to school in all weathers, at first found it

hard to pluck up the courage of her convictions. ‘But after

being interviewed by a newspaper and standing in front of the

whole school to report on the 2006 Conference, I’ve become

much braver about talking about environmental issues, and

encouraging adults to recycle,’ she says.

Håkon says that besides helping to plan the International

Children’s Conference 2008, the three Junior Board members

living in Stavanger meet regularly to work on a competition

they started between classes at their schools. Each student

is encouraged to report on their personal activities for

sustainability, like walking or biking to school, recycling waste

at home, turning off lights or buying organic fruit. The most

environmentally aware class wins a visit to a recycling plant.

But they keep a worldwide perspective on their local

activities. ‘In Malaysia we made friends who didn’t even

have clean water to drink in their homes, or clean air around

them,’ says Håkon. ‘We take all these things for granted

in Norway.’ Ga

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Mari Boine’s latest album cover.

Cold prospect

Get cool!

Just one degree separates ice and water. If the

Arctic’s snow and ice represent the barometer of

worldwide climate change, its indigenous people

are the mercury in it. As the frozen north warms

and the landscape changes, so too do the lifestyles

of those who have lived, travelled and hunted there

for millennia.

And the changes are vast. Permafrost is melting and

the coastline is eroding. Glaciers are receding and the

sea ice is becoming treacherously thin: hunters now

regularly fall through it. In Canada and Alaska the

longer, warmer summers lure southern animals like

grizzly bears northwards.

Plants move too. The 10,000 strong Nenet people of

Siberia are struggling to sustain the reindeer herds

that provide their food, clothing, shelter and transport.

The animals graze on moss and lichen, but these are

now being crowded out by less hardy plants flourishing

in the warmer temperatures.

In all, 4 million indigenous people live in the Arctic,

spread across Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska, Russia and

Iceland. Though their traditions and lifestyles differ,

climate change is putting them all under pressure.

‘The Inuit are a hunting people of the land, ice and

snow,’ explains Sheila Watt Cloutier, former Chair of

the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. ‘Hunting is not just

about killing animals. The process of the hunt and

MeltinglivesCold, empty and very far away, the world’s icy regions

usually linger at the edges of our consciousness.But curiosity is driving more and more people to

see them with their own eyes. The scientists, adventurersand tourists that measure, traverse and snap pictures ofglaciers or icebergs are amazed by their natural beauty,but they often damage what they come to see.

Climbers call it the highest rubbish dump in the world. Toreach the lofty heights of Mt Everest you almost have towade through a sea of discarded oxygen canisters, plasticbottles and other waste. More than 2,250 people haveclimbed the world’s highest mountain since EdmundHillary and Tenzing Norgay first did so in 1953, and haveleft more than 50 tonnes of rubbish behind them topollute the snow, water and soil. Several clean-up

expeditions have been mounted; the most recentcollected 1,600 kilograms of waste over threemonths.

Tourists are Antarctica’s greatest invasivespecies: almost 30,000 tourists will arrivethis year. The majority come in the shortpolar summer and visit the AntarcticPeninsula, just 2 per cent of the conti-nent’s area. Most tour companiesenforce strict guidelines and keep inter-action with wildlife to a minimum, but

icebreakers crashing through the pack icepollute the ocean and air. To make matters

worse, the tourism season coincides with the seal,penguin and albatross breeding season.

Indigenous people have lived in the Arctic for thousandsof years, developing strong cultures and sustainablelifestyles. But recent commercial interest has led peopleand industry to penetrate deep into hitherto pristinewilderness. In an area where a single footprint in thetundra moss can remain for hundreds of years, the effectsof new infrastructure are potentially disastrous. Networksof roads and oil pipelines stretch hundreds of kilometres,disrupting and threatening caribou and reindeer migra-tion patterns. In 2006 one of the pipelines leaked a millionlitres of crude oil near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

Relatively accessible icy areas, such as the European Alpsor North America’s Rocky Mountains, are suffering evenmore from overuse. Skiing itself damages sensitive eco-systems and, as the winters warm, resorts are diversifyingto bring people, and their polluting habits and vehicles,all the year round.

Raising the profile of the world’s ice is important, but so is keeping it healthy. We must strive to find a betterbalance.

18 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

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eating of our food personifies what it means to be Inuit. It is

on the land that values and age-old knowledge are passed

down from generation to generation.’

That knowledge is increasingly being lost. In some areas

elders no longer share their hunting and fishing know-how

with younger generations because it is no longer needed.

Populations of seals, whales and polar bears shift and

change as the patterns of ice become unpredictable.

Communities rely less on hunting and more on shop-

bought, packaged food: in remote regions, food is often

flown in from urban centres in the south rather than made

or hunted locally.

‘The process of the hunt teaches young Inuit to be patient,

courageous, reflective and bold under pressure; how not to

SO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE about theicy regions? Maybe even head for the

high latitudes?

Film itThe 2007 Nordic Youth Film Festival(www.nuffglobal.net) is featuring films onclimate change, and the Planet in FocusFilm Festival (www.planetinfocus.org)will be spotlighting polar films inOctober 2007. Get creative and showthe world how climate change is affect-ing your life.

Get the degreeIf you are craving a degree in Circum-polar Studies, the University of the

Arctic is the way to study. The only chal-lenge could be deciding where to go: theUniversity is made up of 130 universities,colleges and other organizations from all over the Arctic – including Norway’sUniversity of Tromsø, the most northerlyin the world. You could also find yourselfon a North2North exchange, studying inIceland, Russia, Canada or Scandinavia(www.uarctic.org).

The online invasionHarness the power of the internet! TheArctic Youth Network (www.taiga.net/ayn) and Ookpik (www.ookpik.org)connect young people from all over the circumpolar world. Check them

out for Arctic news, art and writing by northern youth, and for upcomingconferences and events.

Hop on boardNobody knows exactly how many youngpeople visit the polar regions each year,but if all goes according to plan, at least500 will be chilling out near the polesover the International Polar Year. Theorganization Students on Ice is mountingArctic and Antarctic expeditions in 2007,with participants spending two weekstouring, researching and participating inworkshops about the polar environment,education and outreach (www.studentsonice.com).

be impulsive, to withstand stress, to have sound judgement

and ultimately wisdom in order to carry out a plan to

achieve a goal.’ Cloutier continues, ‘Let me repeat – our

hunting culture is tied to the land. This is why, for us,

climate change is an issue of our ability to exist as a people.’

Adapting is difficult. The Sami people of Scandinavia fight

legal battles to keep mining companies from drilling in

recently softened permafrost and ice-free sea. Some Inuit

hope that the softened permafrost will finally allow them to

have basements in their houses; others worry that eroding

coastlines will cause their houses to slip into the sea. The

unpredictability of future temperatures, and the changing

landscape that accompanies them, make sustainable

lifestyle choices challenging. The barometer and its mer-

cury are registering alarm.

Melt down 19

Michael Sewell/Still Pictures

20 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

Not just going

with the floeH

e seems like a real life Captain Planet. At only 28, David de

Rothschild has explored Australia, Antarctica, New Zealand

and Greenland, and has now crossed the Arctic. Named one

of National Geographic’s Emerging Explorers of 2007, his main

concern is to use his adventures to mobilize environmental action,

and he has now set up a global, interactive web-based youth

network of ecological ambassadors – Adventure Ecology. TUNZA

caught up with him while he was in London planning his next

expedition, and started by asking about the health of the Arctic…

‘The Arctic ice is a living puzzle. There is no consistency; the pieces are

constantly moving. Surviving there means paying attention all the time!’

David de Rothschild knows what he’s talking about: from March to June

2006 he hiked, skied, dog-sledded and hopped ice floes from Russia to

the Canadian Arctic across the Arctic Ocean – taking in the North Pole on

the way.

‘I wasn’t sure what to expect,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t walked across an ocean

before, and, though I’d done a lot of research on climate change and its

effects on the Arctic, I wasn’t prepared for how much open water and

dangerously thin ice there was. Paul Landry, a polar guide who had last

been in the Arctic three years ago, was astounded at how much it had

changed.’

In a way, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise: de Rothschild dreamed

up the trip, called Mission 1: Top of the World, specifically to highlight the

changes our warming planet has brought to the Arctic. The team of four

included two Canadians – Landry, on his fourth trip to the North Pole, and

his daughter Sarah McNair-Landry, who at the age of 20 has traversed

Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean – and photographer Martin

Hartley. Sixteen sled dogs rounded it off. Between them they carried

2.5 tonnes of gear and 35 kilograms of chocolate. But the team had no

intention of being out of range in the frozen north for months on end:

along the way, they used satellite technology to conduct interviews and

podcasts, and blog about what they were doing and seeing.

Digital communication comes naturally to de Rothschild – a child of the

1980s, he grew up with computers and the internet – and he was taught

about conservation from an early age. ‘My father and aunt grew up in

England during the Second World War,’ he explains. ‘Wastefulness and

unnecessary consumption were unheard of. They had lived through

rationing and real scarcity. They taught me by example to be aware of

living within my means and resources. When I was growing up we reused

plastic bags, and if it was cold we put on a jumper rather than turning up

the heating.’

Cold places don’t seem to bother de Rothschild – quite the reverse. In

2004-2005 he traversed Antarctica and then sped off to cross the

Greenland ice cap. That’s three vast polar landscapes in three years.

Could it get a little monotonous? ‘Absolutely not. They are very, very

different. The Arctic was cold but humid because we were travelling over

an ocean, not a continent. It was also noisy because the ice was constantly

Fabian GottliebThaddeus vonBellingshausen (1778-1852)The Estonian isprobably the firstperson to have seen

Antarctica, after being appointed in 1819to take two ships to find the ‘bottom of the world’. On 28 January 1820 he came to within 30 kilometres of the Antarcticmainland, described in his logbooks as a ‘great wall of ice’.

Fridtjof Nansen(1861-1930)In 1882, on a voyageto Greenland, Nansen found a ship’s log from awreck off Siberia

and realized that the ice pack actually drifts around the Arctic Ocean. Eleven years later he deliberately locked his ship,Fram, into the pack ice, planning to go with the floes. But after making slowprogress for a year, he decided to head north by sledge with Hjalmar Johansen,reaching 86°14’N – the furthest anyone had yet been. The two men had to spend the winter on Franz Josef Land, survivingonly on what they could hunt, before rescue came and they returned to Fram. It took another year for the ship to get back to Norway.

Roald EngebretGravning Amundsen(1872-1928)NorwegianAmundsen, part of the first expeditionsuccessfully to

overwinter in the Antarctic, was racing to the North Pole in 1910 when he heard thatRobert E Peary had beaten him. Turningsouth, he determined to be first at the South Pole instead; Captain Scott’s ill-fatedexpedition was heading for it too, butAmundsen won, raising the Norwegian flagthere on 14 December 1911.

Iceexplorers

www.70south.com

Library of Congress

NOAA Dept of Commerce

Melt down 21

moving and cracking… and we had to be aware of wildlife like seals and

polar bears: not an issue in Antarctica.

‘In the centre of Antarctica it’s dry and crisp. When you are skiing along,

working up a sweat, it can feel like a pleasant alpine day and you look

around and daydream. It’s sterile and silent – a frozen desert.

‘The scale of the geography in Greenland and Antarctica is immense.

These two places fundamentally changed my perception of the natural

world: it’s not human centred at all, and we are – compared to a glacier or

a mountain – minute.’

Before going off to the Arctic, de Rothschild set up Adventure Ecology,

an internet portal (www.adventureecology.com) where young people can

learn about environmental issues, share their stories, develop their

own projects, and follow David’s adventures. People all over the world

celebrated with the Mission 1 team as they stood at the North Pole on

27 April 2006, and followed an agonizing decision by the team to stop the

expedition on 8 June because the ice was rapidly breaking up.

The Arctic sea ice should be a solid, flat plain, but we were dealing with

fresh, thin ice that wasn’t stable. And it moved so much that there was

rarely more than a football pitch’s worth of flat ice. It was continually

broken up by pressure ridges. There’s no doubt in my mind that climate

change is causing the changes. We saw open water in the Arctic in March.

That’s not healthy!’

He is now planning his next trip, but this time he’s not packing a scarf.

Mission 2: Trash Waste will highlight the impact of waste on the planet,

and will take him to the middle of the Pacific… on a raft made of plastic

bottles. As de Rothschild points out, the health of the Earth is in our hands:

‘The planet isn’t the problem,' he reminds us, ‘It’s we who are making the

problems for the planet.’

Matthew Henson(1866-1955)This black Americanwas Robert E Peary’svalet on the 1909expedition to theNorth Pole. Henson

was an able hunter, driver of dog sleds and speaker of the Inuit language. His truecontribution was recognized in 2000 when the National Geographic Societyposthumously awarded him the HubbardMedal, its highest honour.

Tenzing Norgay(1914-1986)In 1953 Tenzing, themost famous of theNepalese Sherpapeople, and EdmundHillary were the

first to conquer Mount Everest. Tenzing hadclimbed Everest as a porter on severalexpeditions in the 1930s, and in 1952reached a record height as a member of aSwiss expedition, just a year before hishistoric first.

Liv Arnesen (b. 1953)and Ann Bancroft (b. 1955)In 2001, formerschoolteachersArnesen (Norway) and Bancroft (USA)

became the first women to cross Antarctica’slandmass, a 2,747-kilometre, 94-day trek.Each has also broken records on her own:Arnesen was the first woman to ski solo (and unsupported) to the South Pole whileBancroft was the first woman to cross the iceto both poles and the first woman to theNorth Pole.

Rob Gauntlett (b. 1987) and JamesHooper (b. 1987)Gauntlett and Hooperhope at 20 to be thefirst to travel fromNorth to South Poles

under their own steam – skiing, sailing andcycling 35,406 kilometres – on their 180Degree Pole to Pole Challenge. Rob andJames want to raise awareness of globalwarming, and hope the Challenge will set an example by being carbon neutral: not only will they be manpowered; any emissionsfrom support vehicles will be offset.

Adventure Ecology

Library of Congress

UPP/Topfoto

bancroftarnesenexplore.com

www.180degrees.co.uk

Frozen fishAntarctic ice fish (Antarctic notothenioids) regularly with-stand temperatures as low as -2ºC as they swim under packice. So why don’t they freeze solid? Their secret weapon isglycopeptide – a mixture of sugar and amino acids thatworks much like the antifreeze humans use to melt ice onwindows – which they produce and pump through theirbodies. Some species of these eerily pale fish also have nohaemoglobin (the red blood cells that carry oxygen), relyinginstead on the oxygen-rich waters of the Southern Ocean.And some species’ large hearts beat just once every sixseconds; understanding these cardiac systems could increasesurvival rates in people who have had heart-lung bypasssurgery or are suffering from hypothermia.

Elusive birdThe Kittlitz’s murrelet is a lonely bird. Alone among Arcticseabirds it seeks the protection of isolation, breeding high inremote mountains in Alaska and Siberia, laying only a singleegg in depressions on the bare alpine ground rather than inconspicuous nests. After the egg hatches, the chick’s parentscarry one small fish at a time to their offspring. Only 10,000of them now remain in the world, and they are threatenedby climate change and pollution. As glaciers retreat inland,their summer feeding grounds – in the waters where glaciersmeet the sea – disappear; and as the ocean warms the fishthey eat decline. They are also vulnerable to an increasingrisk of oil pollution.

ICED

WONDERS7

Snowy catStealthy, solitary snow leopards are perhaps the least-studiedendangered mammal on the planet, and for good reason.Nocturnal, they live 2,000 to 4,000 metres up in the CentralAsian mountains, and can evade investigators by leaping 9 metres – six times their body length – in one bound.Though they have few natural enemies, their numbers havedeclined steadily since the 1970s; now only 4,000 to 8,000are left in the wild. They are threatened by climate change,farmers trying to protect their livestock, and poaching for furand traditional medicines. Involving local people in pro-tecting them is the most effective strategy: in rural Nepal, forexample, committees of elders, herders, women and villageleaders spearhead the movement to conserve them.

22 TUNZA Vol 5 No 1

Stacy Studebaker/USGS

Franco Banfi/Still Pictures

Alan Leschinski/UNEP/Topham

Cold callingThe Antarctic pack ice seems to stretch unbroken to thehorizon, but it is actually dotted with round holes chewedby Weddell seals to give them breathing vents. Named afterthe British explorer who first documented them, Weddellshunt fish and octopus by diving deep beneath them andspotting them in silhouette against the ice. By collapsingtheir lungs and lowering their heart rate, they can hunt for up to an hour without breathing, and dive as far downas 700 metres. They are hunted themselves by orcas andleopard seals, but are excellent communicators, allowingthem to warn of approaching danger; scientists haveclassified 34 distinct Weddell phrases and calls.

Mass krillThe vast Antarctic marine ecosystem is fuelled by a creatureweighing just a single gram. But there are so many of thesekrill that, put together, they weigh more than all the peopleon Earth! These zooplankton are crustaceans, and look a lotlike shrimp. They are not strong swimmers, so rely on thestrong Antarctic currents to take them to their prey, single-celled phytoplankton floating on the ocean’s surface. Krilldrift around in swarms so massive they can be seen fromspace: 2 million tonnes of them can cover over 450 squarekilometres. But their numbers may have dropped by 80 percent since the 1970s, probably due to a combination ofglobal warming and the commercial krill fishery.

Wonder wormsAble to live for years without nourishment and thriving inconditions that would turn most organisms into icicles, theice worm wriggles effortlessly through fissures in glacial icesheets. It propels itself by secreting an ice-melting, tunnel-burrowing enzyme. Until recently the worm – which lives inglaciers and snowfields in coastal Alaska, British Columbia,Washington and Oregon – has been largely unstudied. Butscientists are now keen to find out how enzymes thatregulate their energy cycle allow them to thrive attemperatures where most organisms’ cell energy runs out.This could be valuable in organ transplants, which dependon preserving tissue at extreme temperatures. But as theworld warms up, the worms are under threat.

Melt down 23

A Hartl/Still Pictures

AK Brian/www.akbrian.net

E Hummel/Still Pictures

P Oxford/Still Pictures

Valuing vicuñaThis rarest and smallest member of the camel family is adaptedto the Altiplano – the Andes’ arid, wind-lashed habitat 5,500metres above sea level. Its large heart lets it survive the thin air,its narrow hoofs help it navigate rocky terrain, and its wool –valued for its extraordinary lightness – keeps it warm. After the Spanish conquest, demand for the wool drove it near toextinction. Conservation efforts since the mid-1960s haveincluded adopting the old Incan practice of shearing andreleasing the animals, which have made a dramatic comeback,numbering 200,000 today. However, they are still vulnerableto climate change: vicuña near the Quelccaya ice cap havebeen observed climbing to cooler, newly ice-free areas.

ice

Mars still has it. Shouldn’t we preserve ours?

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